This blog comments on a variety of technology news, trends, and products and how they connect. I'm in Red Hat's cloud product strategy group in my day job although I cover a broader set of topics here. This is a personal blog; the opinions are mine alone.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

This post shares some highlights from Decomposing DevOps: Understanding How to Get Started, a session that I gave at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco this week together with Dylan Silva of Ansible by Red Hat.

Our general approach in this session was to look at DevOps on-ramps first from a primarily developer-centric perspective and then from a more ops-oriented one. These aren’t mutually exclusive especially given that DevOps inherently commingles dev and ops concerns to a certain degree. Nonetheless, thinking about these two different constituencies is one useful way to frame the discussion.

For the dev-centric point of view about DevOps (which is what I’ll cover in this post), I find that a manufacturing metaphor provides useful insights. Whether building a car or building an application, what are some of the important principles to follow?

The first is automation. Worker productivity in automotive manufacturing has doubled in something like the past 20 years. Automating repeatable processes has simultaneously improved predictability and quality. (I guess it’s an exception to the “Better, faster, cheaper: Pick two” rule.) Similarly, developer automation that leads to an iterative CI/CD pipeline with build/test/approve/deliver/deploy stages leads to both faster and higher-quality software delivery.

W. Edwards Deming, one of the original champions of statistical quality control, once said that “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.”

Measurement and metrics are likewise a key ingredient in an iterative software development pipeline. DevOps metrics were actually the topic of a separate birds of a feather session discussion that I led with my colleague William Henry. A full discussion is beyond the scope of this post, but when thinking about collecting data it’s useful to step back and consider your most important objectives and then design a plan from that starting point.

The automotive industry, like others, has embraced the idea of modularity and reuse; about half of all cars are built on a modest number of platforms that share key components and design elements across models and across brands. We see this same modularity in the concept of microservices—small, autonomous, bounded context services that communicate through APIs. Even when microservices aren’t adopted in their purest form, automated DevOps pipelines work most effectively when deployments can be small, frequent, and generally decoupled from other deployments.

If DevOps can be thought of as transitioning software development from craftwork to a more industrialized set of processes, then the place where new cloud-native apps run can be equally thought of as morphing from a workshop to a factory. This factory has characteristics such as the following:

Software-defined infrastructure and/or public cloud

Automation

Application lifecycle management

Developer experience including self-service

Application services (databases, messaging, integration, mobile)

Container ecosystem

Orchestration and resource control

Management

There’s enormous innovation happening in all these areas across a wide range of open source communities. However, making all this consumable for developers is certainly a challenge. That’s a big reason why, in a study of DevOps early adopters conducted last year for Red Hat, IDC found that 80 percent expected PaaS to play a crucial role in enabling DevOps because “Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud infrastructure, self-service developer platform and tools, and lifecycle management with DevOps processes—speeding time to value for both developers and operations."

That’s exactly what OpenShift does by bringing together technologies such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, docker-format containers, kubernetes orchestration, CICD pipelines, and developer tooling. Features include:

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About Me

I'm technology evangelist for Red Hat, the leading provider of commercial open source software. I'm a frequent speaker at customer and industry events. I also write extensively on and develop strategy for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, I wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Among other hobbies, I do a lot of photography and enjoy the outdoors.